Published: 19 June 2012(GMT+10)

Evolutionary researchers recently published a paper in Nature Communications which is an archetypal example of what we’ve been saying for
years.1

Illustration by Caleb Salisbury

The researchers themselves are most probably unaware of this—it’s likely they’ve never heard of CMI; at most they may only have heard mainstream disparaging references to
‘creation scientists’. But the key elements are there in their paper: the grandiose presumption that evolution brought everything into existence, the specific highlighting of one
evident design feature as something that evolution has produced, followed by the bait-and-switch2 to mutational degradation or shifting
allele frequency and/or reproductive isolation as being evidence of ‘evolution’ (which it most definitely is not, in the sense of being support for the idea that microbes
turned into man, over millions of years).

Here’s the first 290 words3 from the Introduction to their paper, in which they give the background to, and outline of, their
study:

“Insects are an extremely species-rich group with about 930,000 species. One of the most important events in insect evolutionary history is the acquisition of flight, which occurred
approximately 400 million years ago. Flight ability facilitates the search and colonization of distant habitats, wide dispersal and the ability to find mates and food. The evolution of flight
is believed to have led largely to the diversification of insects through the exploitation of novel habitats and niches. However, despite the advantages, many insect species of various lineages
have lost their ability to fly. Flightless species account for 10% of insect species diversity, and species that are winged, but flightless due to the lack of flight muscles, are also expected
to occur. The evolutionary loss of flight is attributed to the energetic cost associated with the maintenance of flight apparatuses, relative to other organs essential for survival and
reproduction. Low dispersal ability of flightless species leads to a low rate in gene flow, and as a consequence, differentiation among populations occurs. Lower levels of dispersal result in
higher rates of allopatric speciation. Thus, the loss of flight in various lineages might be an important factor contributing to current insect diversity.

“Coleoptera comprises approximately 40% (350,000 species) of all insects, despite having evolved relatively recently among the insect orders. Approximately 10% of the Coleoptera species
are wingless, although marked variations exist in flight ability among lineages. To test our hypothesis that the loss of flight promotes allopatric speciation and leads to higher species
richness, we addressed, in detail, the causal relationship between flight loss and diversification using carrion beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae) as a model system, two lineages of which (in the
subfamily Silphinae) lost their flight ability due to evolutionary shifts in feeding habit.”

In lay terms (if you’ll permit us some interpretive license here), the essence of the above extract is:

Insects evolved the ability to fly. Flight was a huge advance—it had many advantages.

Despite the advantages, many insects lost the ability to fly. Must have been because flying is too ‘expensive’. Maintaining airworthiness wasn’t
worth it.

The grounded insects couldn’t mix it anymore with the flyboys and flygirls, so with their reduced social circle they could only marry the similarly-grounded
insect
boy-or-girl-nextdoor. Thus ‘reproductively isolated’ from their sky-wandering counterparts, they and their equally-ground-hugging offspring were declared to be a new
‘species’.

Because today we don’t see insects evolving the ability to fly (it happened in the past), we couldn’t study it directly. So we thought instead
we’d look at something we can see today: evolution of flightlessness. That’s because it seems to us that this is now causing many new species to evolve, each in
their own little isolated patch somewhere.

We chose to study carrion beetles—two of these sorts of carrion beetles lost their ability to fly because they decided to stop eating food they had to
fly to get to, in favour of food they only had to walk to.4

It’s not evolution they’re studying, but devolution

Re #1: The progression from flightlessness to flight is evolutionary dogma—it is presumed, without any evidence for it whatsoever. The engineering precision and design
involved in insect flight is astonishing. Insects are so well constructed that engineers are striving to emulate, in as much as they are able to, the amazing design features of flying insects.
E.g. see Astonishing acrobatics—dragonflies, Why a butterfly
flutters by, Aces of the air, Dragonfly design tips,
Why a fly can fly like a fly, and “Lessons from locust wings”5.
To suggest that random mutations, even allowing for selection, could generate this sort of technological achievement, demands a high level of credulousness, to say the least. It certainly places
a tremendous burden of proof on those making the claim to show how such mechanisms for flight could have arisen—which is hardly achieved by showing how they are lost, as these researchers
did.

Showing how such mechanisms for flight could have arisen is hardly achieved by showing how they are lost, as these researchers did.

Re #2: The loss of flight because it was energetically too costly?!! You have to admire evolutionary theory for one thing—its ability to accommodate almost any story, even
contradictory ones.

Re #3: ‘Species’ cannot be equated to the biblical ‘kind’. ‘Kind’, as used in the Genesis account of the creation of animals and plants, is not the same
as man’s classification of ‘species’ (which taxonomists usually define today as a group of creatures reproductively isolated from others, whether by physical barriers or
preferential mating). For example, lions and tigers have been given different species names (even different genus names), yet
the fact that they can hybridize, indicates that they are actually descendants of the same created ‘big cat kind’.
Speciation is not evolution!

Re #4: This is classic bait-and-switch: evolutionists can’t directly study what is presumed to have happened in the past (evolution of flight), so they’ll study what can be
observed today (the loss of flight ability)—and call it ‘evolution’. Creationists have no problem with reproductively isolated populations of insects, because of flightlessness,
being named as new species. But again, speciation is not evolution!

Re #5: The flightless insects didn’t ‘decide’ to become flightless in order to change their diet. Or, using the exact phrase of the original paper, it was not
“due to evolutionary shifts in feeding habit” that a subset of carrion beetles became flightless. Rather, mutational degradation of wings and/or wing muscles compulsorily rendered
a different diet necessary, if the flightless beetles were to survive.

The evidence the researchers observed is not evidence of the evolutionary changes needed to turn bacteria into beetles, but rather is of loss of function, specifically the
ability to
fly.

Conclusion

Nowhere in the researchers’ study is there any evidence of microbes-to-man evolution. That’s because there’s no evidence of the generating of any new genetic
information.6 Instead, flightlessness in insects that could once fly is undoubtedly the result of one or more mutational defects which
prevent the formation of fully-functional wings and associated musculature. That is, the wing-making information on the genes is lost or scrambled in some way. The damaged genes will then be
passed to all that beetle’s offspring, and to theirs, as the mutated genes are copied over and over. All these descendant beetles will be flightless.

So the evidence the researchers observed is not evidence of the evolutionary changes needed to turn bacteria into beetles, but rather is evidence of loss of function. Specifically,
it shows the loss of the mechanisms required to fly.7 Some of the subsequently terrestrially-limited insects could survive this loss, but
with a diet now limited to invertebrate carcasses, as vertebrate carcasses were no longer accessible. Conceivably the flightless carrion beetles are at greater risk of predation than their
flying counterparts. That’s certainly a factor explaining the greater prevalence of insect flightlessness in island environments—see
Beetle Bloopers.

Unfortunately, most people will just thoughtlessly accept this as one more relentless reinforcement of the belief that all around us, we see evidence of ‘evolution happening’.
I.e. the sort of change which, they say, given enough time, turned single cells into all of the complexity of life on Earth. Even though common sense itself indicates that it’s really
evidence of the very opposite—that biological systems initially created in a high state of complexity and function have been running down ever since the Fall
(Genesis 3).

References

Also known as equivocation, this refers to the deceptive (though not necessarily consciously so) tactic of shifting a definition (in this case of
‘evolution’) partway through an argument. Return to text.

Minus, for simplicity, the 21 superscript references to the scientific literature. Return to text.

I.e., as is explained later in the paper, invertebrate carcasses rather than vertebrate carcasses. Return to text.

Note that even demonstrating a small change in a population in the direction of increasing genetic information would not come close to proving that the evolutionary
mechanism is capable of doing all that is demanded of it. But in order for the mechanism to be accepted as even partway credible for the task, a ‘minimum requirement’ would surely
be to be able to see such information-adding change happening all around us. Yet over and over, examples of ‘evolution happening’ turn out to be information-losing, as here.
Return to text.

Loss of flight in insects “may be a common key event” according to the researchers. They point out: “Flightless lineages are found throughout the
beetle families and are especially common in ground beetles (Carabidae), which include about 40,000 species. Although the proportion of wingless species in Carabidae is roughly estimated to be
20–25%, a higher proportion would be flightless due to the lack of flight muscles, and hence, the overall proportion of flightless species should be higher.” Ref. 1.
Return to text.

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Readers’ comments

D. K.,New Zealand, 19 June 2012

Beautifully articulated explanations.

Thank you.

Jack C.,Australia, 19 June 2012

It's an embarrassment for me to be a scientist (retired). I've never seen such nonsense written in a so-called scientific paper (i.e. the one by Ikeda et al. in Nature Communications). It goes to show the evolutionists are trying so hard to prove a dead theory they will say anything, even if it's shown to be complete rubbish by their own rules. Next they will be saying the extinction of species is evidence of evolution.

Your logically robust and gentle peer review is something not permissible in the study of molecules-to-moral-man elusive evolution. Such a review of the study of devolution in evolution science is expensive for it dries up funding for further such studies. Moreover such reviews hurt the fellowship in the community of molecules-to-moral-man evolution scientists, paleontologists and philosophers who perform thought experiments painstakingly without getting distracted by creation worldview in the fallen world we see today.

Jorge S.,South Africa, 19 June 2012

Thanks for illustrating how to approach scientific communications in a discerning manner.

Joshua T.,Germany, 19 June 2012

Thank you for this excellent article. I have particularly enjoyed several of your articles from the past few months. The "Before the Big Bang" paper immediately comes to mind but there were several others too. All of your writers do a terrific job, and I particularly enjoy reading Dr. Sarfati. All glory to Christ Jesus!

jon P.,United Kingdom, 3 July 2012

This is not the 1st time they have retro-engineered the theory to prove it. There was the bacteria that lost function and in doing so eluded/evaded the antibiotics. In their opinion going backwards is a really smart thing to do.